Eagan: Feminists ruin reputation by trashing Lewinsky’s

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Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky’s glamour shot for the new issue of Vanity Fair.

Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern at the center of an alleged sex scandal involving President Clinton, is shown in a photo released Wednesday, Jan. 21, 1998, by the Department of Defense where she worked from April 1996 until Dec. 26, 1997. (AP Photo/Department of Defense,)

FILE - Former President Bill Clinton, left, is seen on March 9, 2004 in New York. Monica Lewinsky, is shown in an undated promotional photo provided by Fox. Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday, Jan. 26, 2014 on NBC?s ?Meet the Press.? that Democrats should remember President Clinton?s sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky before turning their criticism to Republicans? attitudes toward women. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer/FOX, S.Jones, File) NO SALES

MONICA MANIA: A man picks up the latest issue of ‘Vanity Fair’ which features Monica Lewinsky.

“The original target of slut-shaming.” That’s what some young feminists now call Monica Lewinsky, who was shamed beginning when these women were in grade school and is still shamed today.

That’s an important part of Lewinsky’s long Vanity Fair essay, out Tuesday. She’s indeed been “slut -shamed” nonstop since 1998. ?Lewinsky details it painfully. Feminists who should have supported her then did not, and few do today. Lewinsky writes about that awful lapse as well.

Certainly she’s not to be defended as “the other woman” but as the victim of ?vicious, sexist attacks. Tubby, trampy, nutty, slutty, crazy, predatory, a veteran of summer fat camps with one skill and one skill only. These are but a few Lewinsky describers in the media and screamed at her on the street.

Feminists should have defended her then and now as the victim of what they themselves had already defined, post-Anita Hill, as a specific type of workplace sexual harassment. When the power differential is so great — and there’s none greater than that between the president of the United States and a lowly intern — there is no such thing as consensual workplace sex. Period.

But feminists disgraced themselves then by trashing her and defending Bill Clinton because they liked his politics. The conservative politics of Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill’s alleged harasser? Not so much.

And with Monica Lewinsky all over the news again this week, once more we’re looking and looking in vain for her powerful female defenders.

Lewinsky herself wrote in her essay about a New York City roundtable where some famous women writers got together and made gross sexual comments about her on the record and into a tape recorder. Here’s one of the few I can quote: “My dental hygienist pointed out that she has third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong.

Back in 1998 the late Marjorie Williams, in the very same Vanity Fair where ?Lewinsky now tells her tale, accused the country’s most powerful feminists of being “silent or dismissive” about Lewinsky — though they’d just fought to the death for Anita Hill. Among the dismissive: Gloria Steinem.

And Betty Friedan, the supposed mother of modern feminism, who called ?Lewinsky “some little twerp.”

Said famous feminist writer Anne Roiphe, “It will be a great pity if the Democratic Party is damaged by this.” What was damaged instead was the reputation and integrity of organized feminism. It has yet to recover, in part because it has yet to admit owing Lewinsky a huge, and deserved, apology.

The story of Monica Lewinsky is a cautionary tale about sexual double standards that lived in American in 1998 and live on today. Men get caught in humiliations and, for the most part, survive and even recover. Women do not. And powerful women who could try to change that instead just turn on their own. Mostly what I’ve heard and read from women this week about Monica Lewinsky?